A massive earthquake is coming and the GOP has only one move left

When the GOP is taking a beating like this the party’s default response always comes down to one tactic, says New York Times columnist Lisa Lerer.

“As they took the stage at the party’s unusual midterm gathering in Dallas on Wednesday night, amid growing Republican anxiety about the midterm elections, speaker after speaker focused on what they characterized as an urgent threat to American life: a Democratic Party they claimed had veered beyond its traditional liberal principles into a dangerous, un-American ideology,” reports Lerer.

Democrats running for Congress were characterized as “evil,” or “communists and anarchists.” Speakers also claimed Democrats wanted to turn the nation into “a socialist hellscape.”

“I call it the Bolshevik Revolution in the Democratic Party,” said House majority leader Rep. Steve Scalise. “Let’s make sure that when we wake up the morning after Election Day we know we did everything we could to defeat socialism.”

Lerer said President Donald Trump has “long been a master of the politics of fear, regularly stoking anxiety about immigration and crime.”

“Now, as his party faces its most difficult political environment in years, the president and his supporters are attempting — once more — to channel fear into electoral victory,” Lerer said. “It’s a strategy that is both old and new, playing off the rise of the Democratic Socialists of America to stoke Cold War-era fears of communism and socialism.”

She added that by the time Trump took the stage Democratic extremism had been woven into “nearly every aspect of the six-hour program.”

Trump boasted about his tariff policy, lauded his work on the White House ballroom and vowed he would soon win the Iran war he started, but Lerer said Republican candidates appeared to have little to brag about and instead “made little mention of those issues.”

This comes at a time when the party appears to have veery little to talk about beyond the passage of Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill, which has received mixed reviews from critics, and has left even red state legislatures fighting to fill holes Trump’s new budget gouged into safety net programs.

“Historically, the president’s party loses seats in the midterm elections. But for Mr. Trump, the political landscape looks bleaker than most,” reports Lerer. “Surveys indicate that, with the exception of Richard Nixon, Mr. Trump is the most unpopular second-term president at this stage in his tenure in the history of polling going back to the 1940s. On issues where he once was strong — like the economy, national security and immigration — Mr. Trump is now underwater. The wound has been largely self-inflicted, with his support weakened by the unpopularity of several of his signature policies, including tariffs, the war in Iran, Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids and various legacy renovation projects in Washington.”